Nick Cohen on Tony Blair's moral decline:
As one astonished and disgusted former supporter put it: "If you want to know what price a great man will sell his legacy for, it's $13m." According to the Financial Times, that is the sum that President Nursultan Nazarbayev has paid for Blair's services. His old gang is along for the ride and eager to see what an oil-rich dictatorship, which shoots strikers, burns the offices of opposition parties and kills their leaders, can offer....
The regime is grateful and not just for the uses the Blairites' support can be put to abroad. Like every other dictatorship, Kazakhstan wants to show its subjects that foreigners, who have no reason to fear the secret police, endorse the regime of their own free will. The backing of outsiders makes them seem more powerful and their propaganda sound more plausible. (It is for this reason that George Galloway has been such a popular figure in the presidential palaces of the Middle East.)
I know what you're thinking. Blair selling out is hardly news. But – and Observer readers may not provide the most sympathetic audience for this argument – there was always a case for Blair. His dedicated adherents could see no wrong in whatever he did. But others, including your correspondent, were, if you will, "left" or "anti-totalitarian" Blairites. Whatever criticisms of his domestic policies we had, we thought that when set against his enemies, Tony Blair was an admirable man.
Historians trying to capture the hypocrisy of Britain in the first decade of the 21st century may note, as we did, that Blair's opponents turned on him not for allowing the banks to run riot but for insisting that Britain should play its part in stopping the civil war in Sierra Leone, in ensuring that Slobodan Milosevic could not ethnically cleanse Kosovo, in helping throw the Taliban out of Kabul and in saying that after 24 years of occasionally genocidal rule, Saddam Hussein must be removed from power....
Blair's mindless admiration of wealthy men explains his decline. In the 21st century, they tend to be dictators with sovereign wealth funds and tame oligarchs to command, or financiers. No surprise, then, that as well as advising Kazakhstan, Blair also advises JP Morgan.
His love of money has brought down the worst fate that could have befallen him. He now has the manners and morals of his opponents. He has become a George Galloway with a Learjet at his disposal.
No comments yet, when I spotted this, but Nick's set himself up for a kicking from the CiF "Bliar, war criminal" crowd here. He's absolutely right though: Blair was, in many ways, an admirable man.
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